Heartbeat Repeating - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,72
I know you’re gonna be up with the sun.”
“I don’t want to leave you.” She hesitates, so he pushes up on his elbow and sits up so she can drag him into the hug she’s wanted to give this entire time.
It’s warm, and the comfort of it hurts. He lets himself cry, because what’s the point of trying to hold back now? He doesn’t sob, though. He couldn’t if he wanted to. The pain is lodged in his chest like a heavy stone—but his breath is shaky, and he knows he’s going to feel it in the morning.
“Your father’s going to kill him,” she says, and Avery laughs wetly because his parents don’t know, but they probably have some idea what his life has been like for the last year.
It was hard to hide the fact that he suddenly had a nice car and a really decent apartment, and he stopped calling for money to get him through to the end of the month. But they never did ask about it, and he’s not sure he even wants to tell them the whole story now that it ended this way.
“It’s not his fault,” he says after a beat then pulls away and wipes his nose with his sleeve. She reaches for the box of tissue, which is always on every side table in every room, and he plucks a fresh one out. The movement makes him think of Alejandro suddenly. How he pulls out two, discards them then pulls out two more and uses them.
It was something he’d tucked away as pointless information, and now it makes him ache with an intensity he can’t describe. He almost laughs at himself, because who gets teary-eyed over someone’s fucking tissue habits. But, well, here he is.
“I knew it wasn’t going to last,” he tells her when he gets his voice back. “I mean, it was…we both knew there was an expiration date.” He swallows then blows his nose, and he feels better that he’s not openly crying anymore.
“But you loved him?” she asks.
He hates how real it sounds coming from someone else, but he nods anyway. “I loved him. I love him,” he corrects. How Alejandro sounded saying it to his husband—ex-husband…whatever the hell he is—it’s how Avery feels. “He never lied to me.”
“But he broke your heart,” she starts, and he shakes his head.
“I broke it myself. I knew what we were and who we were to each other. It’s not his fault that he was kind and generous. It’s not his fault that I couldn’t keep my end of the bargain.”
She hums softly, and her thumb moves over the sleeve of his shirt she probably knows cost more than her car payment each month. “You have to let me hate him, sweetheart. Because I can never have room in my heart for someone who puts you through this much pain.”
“He’s just my first,” Avery says. He had high school boyfriends, of course. He even had a girlfriend once, though that was short lived. But he’s had plenty pain and messy break-ups and hook-ups that he wanted to be more.
But everything compared to Alejandro feels so shallow, and the irony is laughable and profound. It should have been the other way around. But Alejandro is just so…good, and so deserving. Even when he isn’t, and especially when he’s trying not to be.
He kept his heart away from Avery, he held himself apart, he made it clear there would be no love there. But Avery tripped and fell anyway, and now he’s not sure how to survive without him.
His mother stands up as he lays back down, and his eyes close when she shuts the door behind her. The emptiness of the room surrounds him, and he feels every single beat of his heart as it pounds away in his chest. He hates that he’s alone here. He hates that he’s not brave enough to turn his phone on and face the reality of the situation.
But, as Alejandro said just hours before, it is what it is.
He’ll get up in the morning and have breakfast. He’ll shop with his mom, and he’ll watch some game on TV with his dad. He’ll help out in the kitchen and suffer through his mom’s attempts to cheer him up by inviting the neighbors over for dinner. He’ll shoulder their smiles full of pity and shake off attempts to introduce him to some nice boy or nice girl they know.
And eventually the callouses will build. School